Author: Admin

Classes were canceled at a private university in Washington DC today following a cyber-attack.  Unusual activity was discovered on the Howard University (HU) network last Friday by HU’s information technology team. On Monday, the university announced that it was working with forensic experts and law enforcement to investigate a suspected ransomware attack.  While the investigation is ongoing, HU’s Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) shut down the university’s network. “The situation is still being investigated, but we are writing…

Achieving A Balance Between Public Protection and Public Privacy By Alan McConnell, Forensic Advisor, Cyan The importance of digital evidence contained on the personal devices of suspects, victims, and witnesses in assisting Law Enforcement investigate serious crime cannot be understated. However, never has the public’s awareness of their right to protect personal data on their devices (such as tablets, laptops, and smartphones) been as strong as it is today. While there appears to be a…

A British cybersecurity student has scammed an elderly woman out of thousands of dollars by pretending to be a member of Amazon’s technical support team.  Twenty-four-year-old Ramesh Karaturi contacted his victim over the phone and persuaded her to believe that cyber-attackers had compromised her Amazon account. Karaturi’s victim, who Cleveland Police said was a Scottish resident in her 60s, was then manipulated into installing what she thought was “protective anti-virus software” onto her computer. What the woman installed was a…

A couple from California who were convicted of using fake or stolen identities to claim millions of dollars in Covid-19 relief fraud fraudulently have gone on the run. Authorities said that Encino residents 37-year-old Marietta Terabelian and 43-year-old Richard Ayvazyan cut off their electronic monitoring anklets and absconded. In June, the husband and wife were found guilty of stealing $21m by using a mixture of stolen and fake identities to submit fraudulent applications to the United States’ Economic…

You can tell iOS and iPadOS apps not to track your activity. Here’s how. One way that app developers make money is by tracking your activity in and sometimes outside the app so advertisers can send you targeted ads. But many people balk at this practice, seeing it as an invasion of privacy. With iOS 14.5, Apple introduced a requirement dubbed App Tracking Transparency. With this feature, apps that want to track your activity now…

The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) warns of a spike in sextortion attacks since the beginning of 2021 that caused $8M losses. The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is warning of a significant increase in sextortion complaints since the beginning of 2021. In a sextortion attack, threat actors threaten to distribute the victims private and sensitive material (e.g. videos or photos) if their demands are not met. According to the authorities, the attacks…

Security professionals and technologists old enough to remember renting movies at Blockbuster on Friday nights likely also remember a time when the internet was a new phenomenon full of wonder and promise.  These same individuals probably view it through a more skeptical lens seeing it now as a cesspool of malware and great risk.  It’s also widely understood that no web security solution can offer perfect protection against the metaphorical minefield that is the internet. …